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The Conclusive Scene: Mao and the Red Guards in July 1968

Alessandro Russo

In the very early hours o July 28, 1968, some o the most amous gures

o the subjective turbulence that in the two previous years had invested the

undamental conditions o politics in Chinathe Red Guards and the Mao-

ist leadersmet in a long and dramatic ace-to-ace meeting, a transcripto which was kept in such a deliberately meticulous way that even the emo-

tional tones o the dialogue were recorded.1 The result, thanks to compilers

endowed with a remarkable literary culture (probably one or more o Maos

secretaries), is much more than the bare proceedings o the meeting. One

would be inclined to call it rather a theatricalpice whose authors are the

characters themselves. These characters were subjective gures who met

in the nal moment o the political situation in which their existence isgrounded. As o the next day, the situation would be totally dierentthe

Red Guards would not exist anymore as independent organizations, and

positions 13:3 2005 by Duke University Press.

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Russo Mao and the Red Guards 537

the moment o the meeting in Zhongnanhai, which began at 3 a.m. and

lasted until 8 a.m. (the preerred working hours or Mao and other Chinese

leaders), the ghting at Qinghua had just ended.

The exceptional archival condition o the meetings transcript, which

allows a close refection on that event, crystallizes a singular political inter-

vention. Mao himsel had required the recording and had also decided to

distribute its contents on a large scale, or a reason that he clearly explained

to the Red Guard leaders: Otherwise, at your return, you will interpret what

I have said today as you like. I you do so, I will have this tape be listenedto.3 The issue at stake was how to deal politically with the end o the politi-

cal sequence that had begun two years beore. The public diusion o the

exact terms o that meeting, held at the apex o a month o crucial initiatives

rom the Central Group or the Cultural Revolution (July 1968 is a decisive

month or the years 196676), was thereore considered essential or the

success o Maos initiatives.

The Black Hand and the Red Guards

The accuracy was hence a prerequisite, but not the only quality o the docu-

ment. Sensitive to the subjective details, the transcript is, rom the rst sen-

tences, an accurate record o the style o the various gures enunciations

and reciprocal interactions.4 Although it deserves to be reproduced in ull,

at least some passages o this dense and long piece o documental theatershould be quoted extensively. To ollow the interlacing o the dialogues is

a good introduction to the tangle o the matter. Here is the starting point

o the document, witnessing and at the same time integrating part o the

conclusive scene.

(Nie Yuanzi, Tan Houlan, Han Aijing, and Wang Dabing [four leaders of

the Red Guards] walk into the meeting room. The Chairman stands up and

shakes hands with each one of them.)Chairman: All so young!

(Shaking hands with Huang Zuozhen [a military leader].) Are you Huang

Zuozhen? I have never met you beore; were you not killed?

Jiang Qing ( addressing the four leaders of the Red Guards): Have not

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positions13:3 Winter 2005 538

seen you or a long time. You certainly are not putting up big characters

posters anymore.

Chairman (addressing the four Red Guards): We only met at Tiananmen

[in the summer o 1966], but we did not talk. This is not good. You do

not come up to the Triratna Palace unless there is important business [wu

shi bu deng Sanbaodian, you never come to see me]; but I have read all

your newspapers and I know your situation. Kuai Dau [another student

leader] has not come. Is he unable to come [rom Qinghua campus] or

unwilling?Xie Fuzhi [vice-premier]: I am araid that he is unwilling.

Han Aijing: Impossible. In this moment, i Kuai knew that there is a

meeting with the Cultural Revolution Group o the Central Committee

and could not meet the president, he would cry. For sure, he is unable to

come.5

With the exception o Nie Yuanzi, a cadre o the philosophy department

at Beida and the author o the amous rst dazibao o the Cultural Revolu-

tion, who was in her orties, all the other Red Guard leaders who attended

the meeting were in their early twenties. The seventy-ve-year-old Mao, who

stands up and shakes hands, begins with All so young! almost amazed at

something that he is surely aware o but that, nonetheless, he shall take into

serious consideration in addressing them. The Triratna palace (Sanbao-

dian, rom the name o a Buddhist trinitythe three jewels: the Buddha,

the Law, and the Community o monks) is one o those learned reerencespronounced with a popular tone with which Mao loved to color his spoken

style, especially when he meant to be polemical. Here he seems to use a

joke to attenuate hierarchical relationships. The words spoken to Huang

Zuozhen (were you not killed?), a military leader who accomplished the

dicult task o keeping in touch with the leaders o the Red Guards as well

as organizing their coming to Zhongnanhai, may exempliy the climate

ghts at Qinghua had been bloody and even an ambassador like Huanghad taken serious risks. Maos remark is probably intended to dedramatize,

exaggerating.

Jiang Qing opens with sarcasm. You certainly are not putting up big

characters posters anymore implies: Now all you do is ght. She will

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keep this tone also in her ollowing interventions, showing much anguish

and disappointment, too. She says to them: We are all in great anguish,I am deeply grieved or you, and even I have spoiled you, spendthrits

(baijiazi). Mao will interrupt her several times, admonishing her not to

translate her anxiety into hierarchical superiority (do not get so pued up,

he tells her at one moment, almost revealing a small scne de mnage). He

will do the same with the other Central Committee leaders, oten insisting

that they should not underestimate their interlocutors because o their youth

and not to suocate them with criticism: Do not give yourselves airs likeveterans.

Together with Nie Yuanzi, the leader o the majority action o the Bei-

jing University, called New Beida (Commune), three other little gen-

erals, as the student leaders are aably called during the meeting, enter

the hall. They belong to the two opposite actions erociously struggling or

power in the Beijing University campuses: the Earth action (Dipai) and

the Sky action (Tianpai). These names, which sound so imaginative, werein act rather bureaucratic: two university institutes (Sky was based at the

Institute o Aeronautics, Earth at the Institute o Geology) whose majority

actions wove a complex tangle o opposite alliances in other campuses, by

then lacking any dierence in principles. At a certain point Mao will admit,

All this Sky and Earth stu is not clear to me. Moreover, the names o

the organizations symptomatically overlapped each other, creating bizarre

homonymies.6

Wang Dabing, a student o the Institute o Geology, heads the Earth ac-

tion: he is ully absorbed in his little general role, like the others, ater all.

Mao will address him with good-natured irony, which remains, however,

completely unperceived.

Tan Houlan leads the majority action at the Normal University, which

belongs to the Earth action, too. She is quite young, but rather eared by

her adversaries: Comrade Tan Houlan has two small braids, says Lin

Biao. But she has cannons pointed against Nie Yuanzi [o the opposite Sky

action], Mao says, commenting also: Two o you are women [Tan and

Nie]extraordinary indeed!

During most o the meeting, one among the invited student leaders, whom

Mao is impatient to meet, is absent: Kuai Dau, the most amous Red Guard

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in the country, leader o the Jinggangshan action o Qinghua University

that led a deadly attack on the workers (the opposite action, by contrast, wel-comed them). Kuai Dau will arrive at the meeting ater a long delay, and this

increases the already considerable tension: Is Kuai Dau unable or unwilling

to come? Mao and the others o the Central Group ask repeatedly.

It is oten Han Aijing who speaks in Kuai Daus place, deending Kuai

in heroic-dramatic overtones. Han, a student at the Institute o Aeronautics

and leader o the Sky action, is the only one, among the our little gener-

als, who intervenes with some determination and oten with an overfow-ing pathos, although with weak arguments. He says: I love Kuai Dau.

Since we have done many things together, I know that I will be compro-

mised; I eel that I must do everything to protect him and not allow him to

be overthrown. His destiny is linked to that o the countrys Red Guards.

With the exception o Mao, who addresses Han both strictly and sympa-

thetically, the others o the Central Group show him their impatience: You

always think you are right, Kuai is the commander and Han the politicalcommissary are their ironic comments.

Kuai Dau enters the scene in a theatrical way, toward the end o the

meeting, crying out as predicted since the very beginning by his riend

and ally. But even i Kuai is absent at the start o the meeting, he is the

one whom Mao addresses rst. The day beore, Kuai had sent an urgent

telegram to Mao and to the Central Group to denounce that the workers,

unconsciously manoeuvred by a Black Hand (that is, by a hidden powerthat planned to quench the Cultural Revolution), had surrounded and

invaded Qinghua University.7

Chairman: Kuai Dau wants to capture the Black Hand. All these work-

ers sent to repress and oppress the Red Guards. Who is the Black

Hand? He has not been captured yet. The Black Hand is nobody else

but me! And Kuai has not come yet. He should have come to take me!

It was I who sent the Security Guards o the Central Committee andthe workers o the Xinhua Printing Plant and o the General Knitwear

Mill. I asked them how to solve the armed ghting in the universities,

and told them to go there to give a look. As a result thirty thousand o

them went.8

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It is also obvious that this meeting with the student leaders was the only

one in which Mao spoke to them directly. When he says that at Tiananmenthey had only met without talking, he reers to the great mass maniesta-

tions o the Red Guards held in Beijing in the summer o 1966. It is well

known that Mao did not deliver any speech but only pronounced a laconic

long live the comrades ( tongzhimen wansui), in reply to the numberless

long live the Chairman Mao cheers cried out in the square.9

This last meeting o July 1968 shows also that the relationships between

the Central Group or the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guards hadbeen rather discontinuous and contradictory. During the meeting Mao

regrets not having spoken directly with the students beore, but he also says

that he has tried to avoid any intererence with the situation. The mobiliza-

tion o the workers was decided on ater taking into account other possibili-

ties, among which was the opportunity to let the students solve their own

problems.

What do you think?Mao continuedWhat should be done with the

armed struggle in the universities? One way is to withdraw completely

and have nothing to do with the students; i someone wants to ght,

let him. So ar, the revolutionary committees and garrison commands

have not been araid o disorder caused by armed struggle in universities.

They have not exerted any control or any pressure, and all considered

this was right. Another way is to give them [the students] a bit o help.

The workers, the peasants, and the majority o the students have praisedthis method. There are more than ty institutions o higher learning in

Beijing, but only in ve or six there were erce clashes and your ability

was put to the test. As ar as solving the problem is concerned, some o

you should go live in the South, and some o you in the North. All o you

are called New Beida, with Jinggangshan or Commune between

parentheses, just like the Soviet Communist Party calls itsel Bolshe-

vik.10 . . . I you cannot solve the problem, we may resort to militarycontrol and ask Lin Biao to take command. We also have Huang Yong-

shen [the chie o general sta]. The problem has to be solved, one way

or the other!11

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On the rst solution (some go South, others North), Mao will presently

explain the meaning: the actions had to be dispersed. Personal animos-ity had become so exacerbated that the two actions could not remain in

the same college or the same city without being involved in new ghting.

(This was one o the main reasons why educated youths and cadres were

sent to the countryside as o the ollowing year.) Far worse, the violence

was inversely proportional to any serious distinction o principle between

actions. Mao was quite ironic on the ormalism with which the opposite

student actions obstinately quarreled over the ownership o the great revo-lutionary names, mutually treating each other as counterrevolutionaries. On

the second possible solution, it was obvious that, in Beijing, it was quite easy

to resort to military control, considering the reduced number o students

eectively involved in the ghts. However, the diculty was how to deal

with the problem as a political situation, that is to say, not just in terms o

law and orderit was, in act, a rare example o a nonmilitary solution or

a crisis o that kindbut as an outcome o a subjective process that Maodescribed as ollows:

You have been involved in the Cultural Revolution or two years: struggle-

criticism-transormation [dou-pi-gai]. Now, rst, you are not struggling;

second, you are not criticizing, and, third, you are not transorming. Or

rather, you are struggling, but it is an armed struggle. The people are

not happy, the workers are not happy, the peasants are not happy, city

residents are not happy, students in most schools are not happy, most othe students in your schools are also not happy. Even within the action

that supports you, there are unhappy people. Is this the way to uniy the

world? [tongyi tianxia, uniy everything under the sky.]

( Addressing Nie Yuanzi): In the New Beida, you have the majority,

you Old Buddha (Laofoye). You are a philosopher; do not tell me that

in the New Beida (Commune) [the majority action] and in the Revolu-

tionary Committee o the University [under Nies control] there is nobodyagainst you. I do not believe it at all! They will not say anything to your

ace, but then they make snide remarks behind your back.12

The two student leaders purposely addressed by Mao with sarcasm had

been central gures in the last two years. The one whom he called Old


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Buddha, in the sense o a person who gives himsel/hersel an air o

higher authority, was Nie Yuanzi, whosedazibao had sparked the studentmovement at Beida and had been exalted by Mao in 1966 as a crucial politi-

cal declaration, praising it as the rst Marxist-Leninistdazibao o China,

or even the declaration o the Chinese Commune o Paris o the sixties o

the twentieth century.13 Two years later, Nie was, among the ve little

generals present at the meeting, the one who irritated Mao the most, maybe

because she lacked any extenuating circumstance because o young age.

The one to whom Mao mockingly revealed himsel as the Black Hand wasKuai Dau, the Qinghua student who led the resistance to the work teams

sent by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to liquidate the newborn student

movement in the Beijing campuses in 1966. Kuai had shown personal cour-

age that Mao continued to esteem (Kuaisaid Maois the one who takes

personal risk). However, the situation was radically dierent as compared

with two years beore: the Red Guard organizations were at an impasse rom

which no one among their leaders was able to nd a way out.Despite the irritation expressed by Mao and the other members o the

Central Group, the discussion was carried out in conditions o extraor-

dinary equality. Mao deals with the issues with strictness, but, in many

moments, he shows himsel to be rather aable, given the circumstances.

He addresses his young interlocutors with severe criticisms, but he treats

them all as comrades with whom he has shared many positions in the last

two years and with whom he continues to sympathize. Mao accuses them ohaving become petty militarist politicians incapable o any original thought

about the singularity o the situation. However, during the meeting, Mao

reuses any role o master or higher authority possessing the solution o

subjective dilemmas (Do not say that I am giving instructions, he says,

addressing his colleagues).

The current images o this turning point in the relationship between Mao

and the Red Guards, ound in historiography as well as in the memoirs o

the ormer Red Guards, speak o a charismatic chie who used the mys-

tical inatuation o ingenuous adolescents to overthrow his adversaries at

court.14 At some time, it is said, he decides to get rid o those uncomort-

able supporters, liquidating their radicalisms in the name o the reason o

state. However, the record o the meeting we are discussing, thanks to the

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realism o its unknown writer, shows that their relationships were innitely

more real.The student leaders, all well versed in public speech and redoubtable

polemicists, could oer only inconclusive excuses in response to Maos criti-

cismnot because o hierarchical ineriority but because, in the pursuit o

an imaginary armed struggle or power, they had politically exhausted

the organizations that they had been able to constitute two years beore.

They prove themselves unable to understand the meetings ultimate mean-

ing, considering that some o them continue, more or less directly, to askor an army intervention on their behal in order to overwhelm the opposite

action. The little generals, sti and dazed, are not even able to perceive

the riendly skepticism with which Mao deals with the so-called contrasts

between Let and Right, and the way he replies to them when they pretend

not to be involved in ghting at all. Here they are in a scene where the dia-

logues are particularly dense.

Chairman: Wang Dabing, is your situation easier [compared with that o

Nie Yuanzi]?

Wang Dabing: There were some who opposed Xie Fuzhi, but they

fed. [He means that in his university the ghting is over, and he prob-

ably also wants to show his allegiance to Xie Fuzhi, o the Central Group,

who, however, reacts sarcastically].

Xie Fuzhi: His second-in-command wants to seize power, and says he

is a rightist.Chairman: Is he [Wangs second in command] then so much o the

Let? So Marxist?

Wang Dabing: They are trying to sow discord between us. He is a

good comrade, with good social origins. He suered bitterly and nurses

deep hatred. This man is very straightorward, and ull o revolutionary

energy, with a strong revolutionary character. He is only a bit impatient,

he is not capable o uniting people, and his methods are a bit rigid.Chairman: Could you unite with him? One is Let, the other Right, it

should be easy or you to unite. Come here; sit by my side.

Lin Biao: Come over!

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Xie Fuzhi: Go! Go! (Wang goes to sit down by the side of the Chairman.)

Chairman: Sit down; sit down.In these matters, we should have some leeway. Ater all, they are stu-

dents, not criminal gangs. . . . The key point is the two actions that are

totally engaged in armed struggle have given all their heart to armed

struggle. Such a struggle-criticism-transormation does not work, per-

haps struggle-criticize-quit [dou-pi-zou]. Are not students talking about

struggle-criticize-quit or struggle-criticize-disperse [dou-pi-san]? There

are so many students in the action o the disengaged. Increasinglyunpleasant words are said publicly about Nie Yuanzi and Kuai Dau.

Nie Yuanzi does not have so much cannon odder, nor does Kuai Dau.

Sometimes 300, other times 150 men. How can this be compared with the

troops o Lin Biao or Huang Yongshen? This time, in one shot, I sent in

30,000.15

The ormula struggle-criticism-dispersion parodied the slogan o the

two previous years, struggle-criticism-transormation (dou-pi-gai), that

identied the targets o the Red Guards in the universities. It was never

ocially quoted, but it was the one actually adopted ater the meeting: the

actions were dispersed and the Red Guard organizations, which most o

the students had already abandoned, were dissolved. As or the transorma-

tion o universities, a dierent path was tried.

Very remarkable in this meeting, where a political and not a simply mili-

tary solution is attempted (the power o the repressive machine is obviouslyexorbitant), is that Mao oten emphasizes the subjective relations at stake in

that moment, including those expressed within the meeting itsel. Several

times he puts a stop to the most irritated comments o the other members o

the Central Group, reminding them that they are acing students who have

shown themselves unable to go beyond a heroic and militaristic imagery o

politics but who should not be disregarded just because o their young age.

The severity they deserve should be limited to the solution o the impasse inwhich that imaginary drit has brought them to. However, to all the meet-

ings participants, nding an adequate solution is in that moment equally

hazardous. Neither the hierarchies ounded on age nor those ounded on

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state unctions would have been enough to warrant a set o right decisions

to ace the situations singularity.Here is another passage during which this kind o tension is maniest.

Mao asks himsel, absolutely perplexed, what really led to that impasse, how

to explain (historically, he says) the degeneration into actions.

Chairman: What has happened must have historical reasons; it should

have a history. These things do not happen accidentally. They do not

come suddenly.

Chen Boda: Follow the Chairmans instructions closely; act resolutely

in accordance to them.

Chairman: Do not say instructions.

Yao Wenyuan: The Chairmans words today are sincere and earnest.

Chen Boda: The rst hal o 1966 was relatively good. The colleges and

the universities o the capital did an the fames throughout the country.

Touching o the revolutionary storm was right. Now, they have swelled

up in their heads, they think they are extraordinary. They want to uniythe world [ tongyi tianxia, as above, but likely in a sarcastic sense: they

want to keep everything under their control]. The hands o Kuai Dau

and Han Aijing reach everywhere, but they are ignorant.

Chairman: They are only twenty years old. Do not despise young

people. Zhou Yu [AD 175210, amous general o the Kingdom o Wu]

started as a cavalryman, he was only sixteen years old. Do not give your-

selves airs because you are veterans.Jiang Qing: We took part in the revolution when we were teenagers.

Chairman: Do not swell up; when the body swells, one has dropsy.

Chen Boda: Han Aijing, you have not refected duly on the thought

o the Chairman Mao and on the opinions o the Central Committee,

you have not pondered them. You have called secret meetings relying on

hearsay. Placing yoursel rst, you are on a dangerous road.

Chairman: The rst point is my own bureaucratism; I have never metyou beore. I they had not wanted to capture the Black Hand I would

not have asked you to come. Let Kuai Dau wake up.

Lin Biao: Kuai Dau, wake up, stop your horse at the edge o the cli.

Admit your mistakes!

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Chairman: Do not say, Admit mistakes.

Chen Boda: Kuai Dau does not respect the worker masses. I he stillreuses to listen to us, it will mean that he disrespects the Central Com-

mittee, that he disrespects Chairman Mao. This is a dangerous road.

Chairman: Quite dangerous. Now is the time or the little generals to

make their mistakes.

Zhou Enlai: The Chairman has been saying now is the time or the

little generals to make their mistakes or a long time. [This seems to

mean, now it is time to help them correct those mistakes].. . .

Chairman: Tan Houlans opponents are only two hundred people, but

one year later she has not subdued them yet. In other schools, opponents

are even more, how can they be subjugated? Cao Cao tried to use orce to

conquer Sun Quan but was deeated. Liu Bei used orce to conquer Sun

Quan; he lost Jieting and was deeated. Sima Yi ailed to conquer Zhuge

Liang by orce. The rst battle lasted a long while, but Zhang He hadonly one horse let at the end.

Ye Qun: That was the loss o Jieting.16

In the discontinuous fow o the dialogues, several passages echo remote

reerences. The last sentences contain a dense series o historical reerences

(about the collapse o the Han dynasty and the rivalries among the Three

Kingdoms at the beginning o the third century), surely known to the par-

ticipants, quoted as examples o military tactics that ailed because theywere centered on attack. In his military writings o the 1930s Mao had sub-

tly argued the strategic superiority o deense over attacka line o thought

shared by other great dialecticians o the war like Sun Zi and Clausewitz

and such a theory had been eectively pursued in the Liberation War. How-

ever, political situations are unique and unrepeatable. Further evidence o

this general rule is given by the act that, although the names chosen by the

Red Guards bannered the glories o the peoples war that had character-ized its ounding moment (like the Jinggangshan red bases), their military

style reproduced an insurrectional imagery based on attack. Instead, the

Jinggangshan bases were made possible only when, at the end o the 1920s,

Mao abandoned the insurrectionary vision, by then dominant in the Chi-

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nese Communist Party (CCP), and elaborated a military strategy based on

the supremacy o deense.Here it seems that Mao was musing on the situation and that he did not

mean to give a lesson o military history to the Red Guards; he considered

the ghting in Beijing campuses totally absurd even on the military plane:

What kind o war are you ghting? It is nothing! You only have home-

made weapons. Mao tells the students: I you are capable o it, you should

lead the war on a large scale, but it is clear that they are only mimicking a

revolutionary military heroism that is completely imaginary and that theyare being allowed to do so just because the military apparatus has decided,

so ar, not to intervene. This little civil war is not a serious thing, con-

cludes Mao, and even more so it must be stopped soon.

Lin Biao argues in a classical dialectic Chinese style, to conrm the non-

negotiable demand to stop the armed struggle: In all the great events in the

world, it should be unity ater long disunity and disunity ater long unity.

All your deenses aimed at armed struggle must be dismantled. All hotweapons, cold weapons, knives and rifes should be put in storage.17

The discussion involved several details about the situation that would

require elaborate annotations. I thereore limit mysel to the two main con-

cerns that animated the meeting: the urgency to stop the ghting between

the actions and, parallel to that, the even more uncertain problem o the

destinies, both political and intellectual, o the university.

We Do Not Want Civil War

These are our reasons: rst, we want cultural struggle, we do not want

armed struggle; the masses do not want civil war at all. These are the

two main arguments that Mao and the other members o the Central Group

address to the students. Mao admits that there are dierent points o view

between the actions and that, in the nal analysis, he agrees more with one

action than with another; however, he notes that none o this justies the

absurd war ought by the students in the campuses.

He quotes, or example, the theory o the certain victory, ormulated

by the April 14th action hostile to Kuai Dau, according to which the

action was sure to achieve victory in the struggle or power on the basis

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o the principle that those who conquer the power are not capable to gov-

ern. In other terms, Kuai, who had overthrown the ormer authorities andconquered power at Qinghua, could do nothing but hand over power to

April 14th, because the latter had been ormed later. As or the value o the

arguments supporting the historical law expressed by April 14th,18 it was

apparently a rather instrumental theory, aiming only to justiy the April

14ths opposition to Kuai. Mao declares, in act, that he does not eel any

special sympathy or that doctrine o the certain victory while stressing

nonetheless that it should to be ree to exist exactly because it intends to be apolitical theory: April 14th has a theorist called Zhou Quanying. Why

should we arrest a theorist? He is a theorist o a school o thought. He writes

articles. Why should you arrest him? Release him. He has his opinions. Let

him write again! Otherwise, they will say that there is no reedom.19

It should be recalled that reedom o political thought, here openly

deended by Mao even in the case o a rather poor theory, was the key

issue in constituting the Red Guards since the second hal o 1966. Thesearose as a multiplicity o organizations that sel-authorized their own exis-

tence while supporting their own capacity to ormulate political declarations

in places external to the party-state, and at the same time prescribing the

latter to admit and to promote their existence. The decline and militaristic

degeneration o these organizations were marked by very dierent inten-

tions. In the expanding phase o the pluralization process (roughly rom the

rst dazibao at Beida to Shanghai January Storm), the main issue at stake

was how ar the multiplicity o sel-authorized and independent political

places could be extended. In the declining phase, the so-called actionalism

was increasingly marked by mutual harassment by organizations involved in

the struggle to cut each other short. These eventually considered the annihi-

lation o their opponents as the prime condition or their own existence, each

o them regarding itsel as the nucleus o the regeneration o the party-

state. This was the main motive that led to the present sticking point.

I sayMao continued in his colorul polemic register, while addressing

Nie Yuanzithat you, Old Buddha, should be a little more generous.

There are several thousand people in Beidas Jinggangshan [the action

adverse to her]. I they are released like a torrential food, they will wash

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out the Dragon Kings Temple [Nies headquarters]. How will you stand

that? Otherwise, Old Buddha, we will impose military control. The thirdmethod is to act according to dialectics: you do not live in the same city,

one divides into two, either you or Jinggangshan moves to the South. I

one is in the South and the other in the North, you will not see each other

and you will not be able to ght. Each one puts its own aairs in order

and then the entire world will be united [yi tong tianxia]. Otherwise, you

also will be araid. I they launch an attack on the nest o the Old Buddha

[another sarcastic name or Nie Yuanzis headquarters] you will not beable to sleep. You are araid, and they are araid too. It is necessary to hold

back a little. Why should you be so tense?20

Mao and the others o the Central Group repeatedly expressed their

great indignation or the gratuitous cruelties the actions inficted on each

other and or the complacent slogans that threatened to slaughter and

to cook the adversaries. Furthermore, the arguments that each action

used to accuse their opponents o being counterrevolutionary and to treatthem as war enemies were ludicrous. When Mao asked Nie Yuanzi why she

regarded the adverse action as counterrevolutionary, she answered: They

organized a reactionary block that viciously attacked Chairman Mao and

Vice-Chairman Lin. Mao sharply replied: What is the matter i they slan-

der us a bit? The evidences Nie produced about the political crimes o

her adversaries were null: Let them criticize us, Mao said several times,

how would it be possible not to have opponents?On the tortures inficted on their opponents by the little generals who

claimed to emulate the glories o the peoples war, Mao reminded them

how ar more civilized was the style o the Peoples Liberation Army, despite

the act that it was composed o soldiers and even generals with very poor

ormal education. Two rough ellows (tupaozi), Mao said, jokingly reer-

ring to the chairman and the vice- chairman o the general sta present

at the meeting, who had attended only a couple years o primary school,compared with the long curricula o the Red Guard leaders, who could

denitely be considered intellectuals (zhishifenzi). Whereas in the army,

Mao said, deserters were not put under arrest anymore and isolation was no

longer used as a punishment, in the student actions arrest was requently

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used and the opponents treated as prisoners o war to be subjected to coer-

cion and orced to coness; those who reused to coness were beaten todeath. I think the intellectuals are the most uncivilizedcommented Mao

sourlydo you say that they are the most civilized. I do not think so. The

less educated are the most civilized.

Among the members o the Central Group, Jiang Qing was the one who

was the most distressed about the treatment o the opponents. At the Nor-

mal University, where Tan Houlan was in command, many students o the

opposite action had been put under arrest and imprisoned or several daysin the dark with neither ood nor drink:

Jiang Qing (addressing Tan Houlan): . . . How could you have done this?

As soon as they told me, I could not help crying. These hundreds, or tens

o persons, ater all they are the masses . . .

I have no riendly eelings toward your opponents. It is said that [they]

are against us. We are not speaking in their name, but release them!

Proletarians should stress proletarian humanitarianism. These dozens ocounterrevolutionaries are, ater all, youths.

They want to strangle me to death. I am not araid o being ried in oil.

I have heard that Beida Jinggangshan wants to ry Jiang Qing.

Yao Wenyuan: Frying is just so to speak.

Chairman: They even say to strangle Kuai Dau to death.

. . .

Jiang Qing: Nie Yuanzi, have I still some right to speak? I am deeplygrieved or all o you. Now you are all masses struggling against other

masses, and the bad people are hiding. . . . April 14th says they are de-

nitely going to win. April 14th is especially against the Central Group

or the Cultural Revolution [that is, against the leaders present at the meet-

ing]. They are also against the Premier [Zhou Enlai] and Kang Sheng

[o the Central Group]. Nevertheless, they are a mass organization.

You know where I live. I you want to strangle me, go ahead. I youwant to ry me, go ahead. We were in troubles and adversities together.

I you cannot tolerate others, how can you rule the country and bring

peace in the world [zhi guo ping tianxia; the sametianxia as above, but not

sarcastic]? I think you are not studying the Chairmans works, and you

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are not learning his working style. The Chairman always makes unity

with those who oppose him.Chairman . . . ( addressing Nie Yuanzi): What you cited [as the crimes

o your opponents] are nothing but [their] attacks on Jiang Qing and

Lin Biao. We can write them o at one stroke. They only talked among

themselves privately, they did not go out to postdazibao.

Jiang Qing: Even i they postdazibao, I am not araid . . .

Chairman ( addressing Nie): . . . You cannot get rid o thousands o

members o the Beida Jinggangshan . . .Nie Yuanzi: More than one thousand let the Jinggangshan. They are

holding study classes [she means that they are under the control o her

action].

Chairman: You cannot rely on those who leave Jinggangshan. Most o

them are physically with Cao Cao, but, with the heart, they are with the

Han.21 Physically they are with the Old Buddha, but their mind is with

Jinggangshan. Do not do anything to Niu Huilin [leader o the oppositeaction], let him go with Jinggangshan, let him ree. We should not com-

pel or insult others, especially not beat people and not extort conessions.

In the past, we committed many mistakes. You are making this mistake

or the rst time; we cannot blame you.22

Since the hostilities among the Red Guard actions were deeply entangled

with the relationships that the student leaders held with individual mem-

bers o the Central Group,23 Mao and the other central leaders repeatedlyemphasized that to be or or against some o them did not constitute any

possible reason to continue the struggle.24 The Central Group was united

and resolute in its request or an immediate cessation o the ghting.

The intransigence o the Central Group on this point was augmented

by the trend, worsening in the recent months, o an interlacing between

student actionalism on one side and, on the other, a series o divergences

among military commands that, i ully developed, could have turned theghting among small student actions into conficts among real warlords.25

The student leaders, or their part, seemed not to be worried about that pos-

sibility. Some o them, during the meeting, indirectly advanced the request

o the armys support to their actions or overwhelming their adversaries.

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Nie Yuanzi went urther in asking the support o a particular army unit

that she considered close to her action. You want that all be made accord-ing to your preerence, Mao replied with anger.

The intererence o student actionalism with the military was one o the

meetings hottest issues, and it emerged very excitedly when a worried Zhou

Enlai intervened about a meeting o the Scientic Committee o National

Deense that some student organizations had called at the Beijing Institute

o Aeronautics. It is clear that the Scientic Committee was an organism

situated at the institutional joint between military and academic-scienticapparatuses and that the Institute o Aeronautics was closely connected with

the programs o national deense. How did you dare to call that meeting?

Zhou Enlai thundered to Han Aijing. You know that it deals with secrets

o national deense. Hans long answer reveals the mix o complacence,

adventurism, and tactical opportunism that led the little generals to an

impasse disproportionate to their capacities.

Han Aijing: We did not call that meeting. You may investigate. WuZhuanbin o Guangdong called the meeting. I was ill, and beore going

to the hospital, I lived at the School o Physical Education. A telephone

call came rom the school asking me to receive two standing members o

the provincial revolutionary committee. People say: Up there is Heaven;

down there is Beijing Aeronautical Institute. I did not enthusiastically

welcome the leaders o the May 4th Students Congress and the various

leaders o the rebel actions rom other provinces, so we were criticized orbeing conceited and arrogant; they even said that we were rich peasants

and not revolutionary anymore. Thus I accepted to receive them. As they

were leaving, they wanted to call a meeting to discuss the national situa-

tion. I told them that i they call such a meeting in Beijing it would be a

black [that is, an illegal] meeting. In Beijing, the situation is very compli-

catedthere is a Sky action and an Earth action. I agreed to have a chat

with some reliable leaders o rebel actions and the responsible persons orevolutionary committees, just or talking about the situation, without

discussing any specic measures. Both Kuai [Dau] and I went to those

talks; then I entered the hospital. As soon as the meeting started, every-

body elt that things were going wrong. Those rom the Geology Institute

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ater having attended the preparatory meeting did not attend the other

ones. Kuai Dau, ater listening or a ew minutes, ran away scared romthe meeting, and the representatives o Jingganshan did the same. One

ater another, schoolmates inormed me; I said we should hasten to write

reports; who would have thought that we were already criticized. 26

Another essential reason to ask the Beijing students leaders or the end

o the struggles between the actions was due to the national echo that the

events unavoidably assumed. The ghting in Beijing was actually only a

ew thousand students in ve or six campuses, but in the last months in

some provinces, especially in Guangxi province, there had been much more

serious ghting. In the ace o the situation in Guangxi, the Central Group

or the Cultural Revolution had issued an announcement on July 1, asking

or the immediate cessation o the armed struggle.27 The continuation o

ghting in some Beijing campuses (the organization o Kuai Dau stated

that the announcement was applicable only in Guangxi, but not in Bei-

jing) infuenced the situation in the whole country, because o the prestigeenjoyed by Beijings Red Guard leaders. About the cessation o the armed

struggle, Mao was intransigent. Whoever kept on ghting would be dealt

with as a criminal.

Chairman: Somebody says that notices issued on Guangxi are applicable

only in Guangxi and those on Shenxi are applicable only in Shenxi. Now,

I issue another nationwide notice. I anyone goes on running counter

and ghting the Peoples Liberation Army, destroying means o trans-

portation, killing people, or setting res, he is committing crimes. Those

ew who turn a dea ear to persuasion and persist in not changing their

behavior are bandits, Guomindang elements subject to capture. I they

continue to stubbornly resist, they will be annihilated.

Lin Biao: At present, some o them are true rebel groups; others are

bandits and Guomindang elements that are using our fag or rebellion.

In Guangxi, one thousand houses have been burned down.Chairman: In the notice it should be written clearly and explained

clearly to the students that i they persist and do not change, they will be

arrested. This or the light cases; in the serious cases, they will be sur-

rounded and suppressed.

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Lin Biao: In Guangxi one thousand houses have been burned down

and they were not allowed to put out the re.Chairman: Was not the Guomindang just like this? This is like the

desperate agony o class enemies. Burning houses is a grave error.

Lin Biao: During the Long March I entered the Guangxi, where I

deeated Bai Chongxi. He too used this method: he burned houses and

tried to make believe that they were the Communists who did it. It is the

same old tactic used again.

Han Aijing: Kuai Dau is riding a tiger rom which he cannot get down.Kang Sheng: It is not the kind o situation as you say.

Chairman: I he cannot get o the back o the tiger, then let us kill

the tiger.28

To kill the tiger meant to declare the end o the Red Guards as politi-

cally independent organizations, which was in act the main result o the

meeting. The arrival o Kuai Dau conrmed the subjective breakdown

that the meeting was trying to deal with. Kuai broke into the hall two-thirds through the meeting, sobbing theatrically, just as his riend Han

Aijing indirectly had anticipated at the beginning. The tragicomic eect, as

the transcript scrupulously recorded, clearly showed on Jiang Qings ace:

Huang Zuozhen reports that Kuai Dau has arrived. Kuai enters cry-

ing out bitterly. The Chairman stands up, goes toward him and shakes

his hand. Comrade Jiang Qing is laughing. Kuai, still crying, introduces

his case [gaozhuang, introduces his complaints to superiors]; he says

that Qinghua is in extreme danger, that the workers, manipulated by the

Black Hand, entered Qinghua to suppress the students, and that there is

a big plot behind it all.29

To understand how dierent the situation was, one should consider that

in June 1966 Kuai emerged as a brave leader o the student rebellion at

Qinghua, writing an open letter to the hesitant, whose general intona-tion was the ollowing: I sincerely hope that in this dicult and crucial

moment you remain rm. The train o the revolution, which is running at

very high speed, is entering a sharp bend. Keep yoursel rm i you do not

want to all down and shatter.30

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Two years later, Mao met a whimpering Kuai Dau, to whom he could

not but repeat what he had already said to the others, adding serious crit-icism or the bloody attacks led by Kuais action against the workers at

Qinghua the day beore. The opposite action, the April 14th, had in act

welcomed the workers, while the Jinggangshan o Kuai Dau, with which

Mao said he was more sympathetic, had launched a deadly attack against

them:

Chairman: You want to arrest the Black Hand; I am the Black Hand.

There was no other possible way to deal with you. We are more sympa-thetic with your action, I cannot accept April 14ths idea o the sure vic-

tory, but we must win over their masses, including some o their leaders.

The main idea o Zhou Quanying is that those who conquer power cannot

rule, thus Kuai Dau cannot but transer the power to the April 14th.

We asked the workers to do some propaganda work, but you reused.

You knew well how many people were coming or making propa-

gandaHuang Zuozhen and Xie Fuzhi had talked to you, there wasnothing else to do. The workers were bare-handed, but you rejected, you

have attacked, killing and wounding them. In the case o Beida also, we

are more sympathetic to Nie Yuanzi. We are more inclined toward you,

ve great leaders, but did you not know what those tens o thousands o

workers were coming to do at Qinghua University? I there was not a

decision o the Central Committee, how could they have dared to come?

You have been very passive. On the contrary, April 14th has welcomedthe workers, you o the Jinggangshan, instead, did not welcome them,

and you were wrong.31

Unable to reply, Kuai was so conused that Mao, ater criticizing his pas-

sive (in the sense o politically inert) behavior, did not insist too much, and

eventually he just suggested Kuai nd a place to rest. Zhou Enlai, or his

part, recommended Han Aijing take care o his ally and help him nd a

way out. The attitude o the Central Group or the Cultural Revolutionwith Kuai and the other student leaders was very patient, notwithstanding

the gravity o the situation.

Mao had also expressed a precise evaluation o the paroxysm o student

rebellion during the previous months:

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There is quite a bit o anarchism. In this world, anarchism [wu-zhengfu,

no government] is correlative with government. As long as there is gov-ernment in the world, anarchism cannot be eliminated. [Attitudes o]

servility and docile tool that in the past have been told [to youth] now

turn in their contrary. This is the punishment o the right opportunism,

the punishment or the right opportunism o the Central Committee.32

It could be said that, ater all, any censorship has always a correspond-

ing return o the repressed. However, against the backdrop typical o Mao

o a general philosophical atalism about the unavoidable countereects othe very existence o government, what he was proposing was a prop-

erly political judgment on the situation. Did not the party-state disseminate

and impose, especially among the youths, acquiescence and even servility

as qualities o a good Communist?33 The present anarchism was the

opposite result, commented Mao. It was a sort o Dantesque contrappasso,

or the retaliation that the right opportunism o the Central Committee

had ully deserved.The meticulous methods, in no way inerior to those o the Jesuit colleges

in the European Renaissance, or disciplining schools and university stu-

dents in the early sixties would deserve specic research.34 Many actions o

brutality and even cruelty o the Red Guardsthis was the sense o Maos

bitter remarkwere the tragic result o a basic ailure o the pedagogy

o the party-state and o the program o moral perecting o the youth in

which the Chinese educational apparatuses were engaged during the previ-ous two decades.

Should We Still Be Running Universities?

Besides the ghting in Beijing universities, the other important topic dis-

cussed that day unavoidably regarded the institutional and intellectual des-

tinies o the university. The issue, about which the uncertainty was probablygreater than that about how to stop the armed struggle, was crucial or

several reasons: the central place occupied by the university system in the

Chinese state apparatus in the 1950s and 1960s; the obvious ailure o any

attempt to reorm university education through the Red Guards activism

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case o a sel-taught writer o peasant origin, Gao Yubao, who had been

rewarded and sent to university. His case was the object o a large propa-ganda eort as the result o the democratization o the Chinese school, but

as soon as Gao entered university, he stopped writing altogether. 36

The skepticism about the results o previous educational policies was

almost total. Look at some o our boys who attended school or more than

ten yearssaid a disheartened Maothey are so physically destroyed as

to be unable to sleep. A boy studies history, but he does not understand the

class struggle. In other terms: is to philosophize, to write novels, to makepolitics in a thoughtul way, intellectually homogenous to the system o uni-

versity knowledge and its transmission? In the summer o 1968, these were

key intellectual questions worldwide. According to Mao:

When studying literature, one should not study the history o literature,

but should rather learn to write novels. Write me a novel per week. I

one is unable to do it, go to a actory to work as apprentice. During his

apprenticeship, he should write about his experience as an apprentice.Nowadays those who study literature are unable to write novels.37

Besides showing an intense aversion, not groundless indeed, to the his-

tory o literature, Mao here talked about going to actories and to the coun-

tryside to become an apprentice or a peasant in order to be able to write

novels: certainly a thorny problem, open to various misunderstandings.

However, which writer has really learned more or his art rom university

education than rom living the reality o the relationships among people?

Factories and countryside designated here that principle o reality that is

the existential horizon o 90 percent o people in China at that moment. On

the other hand, looking at the Chinese literary blossoming o the 1980s and

1990s, it is signicant that great poets like Bei Dao, Mang Ke, and Yang

Lian, or narrators like Han Shaogong,38 began to write at the end o the

1960s, when they had been sent as young educated people in the country-

side and that nobody among them ever attended the university. Can weassert that the interruption o the university teaching o literature during

those years has been so harmul to contemporary Chinese literature?

What was at stake, ater all, was the role o the modern university in the

relationship between the intellectualityo art, politics, or philosophy

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and its didactic transmissibility. University apparatuses o the socialist state,

which in those years in China were modeled on the Soviet system, had pre-tended to embody the perect balance between thought and knowledge, but

this was exactly what the current crisis was radically reuting, impelling

China to nd new paths. For this reason Mao, who was ar rom being per-

suaded o the superiority o the socialist university, emphasized that Marx-

ismthat was the core o the Chinese university knowledge o that time,

and in particular o the philosophical oneshad not been ormed in the

university. No one among the great Marxists had graduated, except Marx,who to be sure did not ollow an academic career. As or the school records

o the others, as Mao recalled, Engels began to make inquiries on workers

while he was a bookkeeper in his athers actory and studied by himsel

at the British Library. Lenin attended university or two years; Stalin only

some years at a secondary school (run by the church, Mao specied, maybe

not without irony). Gorky went only two years to a primary school, less than

Jiang Qing, who attended some years more, and less than Lin Biao, who,

having attended some years o middle school, could be dened an intel-

lectual, as Mao jokingly commented.

Mao said he had not been a good student (I have only tried not to be

thrown out o school), but this should not be taken too literally. As a stu-

dent and later as a teacher o the Normal School o Changsha, he was or

several years a young militant educationalist who took part in important

initiatives in the most advanced currents o educational reorm o the May

Fourth movement. Traces o those experiences emerge in this meeting, as

or example the Hunan sel-study university (zixiu daxue) that Mao ounded

in 1921 and that then produced a signicant echo at the national level (Mao

will in act repropose a sel-study system).39 Peculiar to those experiences,

as well as to the school policies o Yanan in the 1930s and 1940s, was to

consider school and university policies as a crucial terrain o political and

intellectual experimentation, and not only as elements o the modern state

system to be taken or granted. They in act created remarkably inventiveorms o school.40

Other leaders present at the meeting had been protagonists o those

experiences, like Zhou Enlai, who in his youth was active in the vanguard

intellectual and educational reorm currents o the May Fourth, and Lin

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Biao, who at Yanan directed the University o the Anti-Japanese Resist-

ance (Kangda). Although they avoided boasting o any special expertise inthe educational eld and proudly declared themselves to be sel-taught, a

number o the leaders present at the meeting had in act a deep knowledge

o the problem. Nevertheless, with the irreversible crisis that the school and

university policies o the socialist state revealed in that moment, the issue o

which new criteria should inspire an educational reorm was then the most

uncertain or all the participants. The evaluation o the last two decades was

or them largely negative, and the experiences o the last two years did notshow any new path.

No steps orward have been made in the educational reorm, some-

one said during the meeting. I no steps orward will be made in the edu-

cational revolutionMao replied to the studentswe too will not make

any step orward, let alone you. The old educational system damaged you.

Moreover, i the situation would be blocked in the ghting between student

actions, it was impossible to nd out something new:

Chairman: . . . As I see it, i all is reduced to these ew matters [o the

student actions], what revolution in education can we do? I we ail, let

us disperse [san]. This is what the students say, not inormation that I get

rom the disengaged [xiayoapai]! . . .

Yao Wenyuan: I am inclined to accept that in some schools there

should be struggle-criticize-dispersion [dou-pi-san], or struggle-criticize-

quit [dou-pi-zou].Chairman: . . . With the two actions going on like this, I think that

even i they do not want to quit they should quit [the campuses]. . . .

When they leave the territory empty, let in their place go people or sel-

study o [zixiu] how to write a novel. I you study literature, you should

write poems and drama. Those who study philosophy should write am-

ily history, history o the revolutionary processes. Those who study politi-

cal economy should not learn rom the proessors o Peking University.Are there any amous proessors at Peking University? These topics do

not need proessors who teach. Proessors who teach, this is a harmul

method. Organize a small group and study by yoursel, [run] a sel-study

university [zixiu daxue]. Come and go, hal a year, one year, two years, or

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three years. No examinations: examinations are not a good method. Sup-

pose ten questions are asked about a book, which contains one hundredviewpoints: do they not only cover one-tenth? Even i you answer cor-

rectly, what about the other 90 percent?

Who examined Marx? Who examined Engels? Who examined Lenin?

Who examined Comrade Lin Biao? Who examined Comrade Huang

Zuozhen? The needs o the masses and Jiang Jieshi have been our teach-

ers.41 This was the case or all o us. Teachers are needed in middle

schools but everything should be simplied and the superfuous elimi-nated [shan rong jiu jian].

Yao Wenyuan: Open a ew good libraries.

Chairman: Give workers, peasants, and soldiers time to use them. To

study in a library is a good method. I studied at a library in Hunan or

hal a year, and in the library o Peking University or another hal a year.

I choose books by mysel. Who taught me? . . .

Universities are run in such a lieless way. There should be some more

reedom.42

As I have noted, these were crucial topics worldwide. Was not the intel-

lectual value o the modern university, and then, in the long term, its insti-

tutional existence too, at stake, in China as in France or elsewhere? It is

usually said that China had been isolated rom the rest o the world or ten

years. But any university student or teacher, in July 1968, who was not ask-

ing himsel somewhat radical questionsabout the useulness or the dam-age o academic lessons, or the intolerable bureaucratism o exams, or the

need or reedom o choice in studylost a great chance to refect on some

essential circumstances o his own intellectual existence.

The End of the Sequence Declared

Ater the end o the meeting, the ve little generals were kept a littlewhile at Zhongnanhai. What about today? Do you think that we are going

to arrest you and to put you in isolation? Mao had said sarcastically, blam-

ing them or the cruelties against their opponents and or the deadly attack

against the workers at Qinghua. The student leaders were in act treated

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rather magnanimously. They were only asked to sign a brie summary o

the discussion and then disperse it on their campuses: two pages in all, con-taining the main arguments with which Mao and the others o the Cen-

tral Group had harshly criticized the student leaders or their behavior and

asked or the immediate end o the ghting.43

The meeting conrmed that the situation had reached a sel-destructive

gridlock because by that time Red Guard organizations were lacking any

political content. Two years beore, the Red Guards had been welcomed by

the Decision in Sixteen Points o August 1966 as an excellent bridge thatallows our party a closer tie with the masses. They should be considered,

continued the document, not as temporary but as permanent organiza-

tions, destined to operate or a long time and not only in the schools and

universities; their expansion to actories, mines, neighborhoods, towns, and

countryside should be welcomed also. In July 1968, with the dispatching o

the workers at Qinghua and with this meeting, Mao and the Central Group

declared in act that the subjective existence o that kind o organization

should be considered as concluded. As or the political sequence started in

June 1966, those places in which the masses liberate only by themselves,

and no one must in any way act in their place, as told by another amous

passage o theDecision in Sixteen Points, had come to an end.

With the decomposition o the rebel organizations, the most dicult

problem or Mao and the Central Group was not how to halt armed strug-

gle on the campuses but how to intervene in the student actionsdisarm-

ing them and in act envisaging their dissolutionwithout destroying the

subjective energy that allowed their existence. It is remarkable that the

main initiatives taken by the Central Group at the end o July 1968 crossed

the theme o the university with that o the actories and the workers. The

choice to involve the workers and the actories with the educational issues

can be considered, using a classical Maoist category, a strategic retreat.

The retreat would be made only ater having identied a terrain to orient

themselves, to keep the chances to experience new orms o sel-emancipa-tory politics alive, on the basis o the political energy o the last two years.

Sending the workers to the Qinghua campus was above all a way to deal

with that situation as a political matter, rather than simply as an unavoid-

able police operation. The workers entered Qinghua to disarm the students,

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screaming slogans like use reason not violence, lay down the arms, orm a

big alliance, and thanks to this rationalist discipline, absolutely rare in thiskind o event, they accomplished the task o stopping the ghting.44 Mao

mobilized the workers as possible protagonists o political inventions and

not as substitutes o the states repressive apparatus. The demonstration o

the workers at Qinghua, to be sure, also carried out a highly symbolic role,

thanks to the prestige o the category o working class in the ideology o

the socialist state. However, Mao was not leaning on a xed and stable point.

Although that decision seemed to arise rom the canonical options o Marxist-Leninist culture, and to bring the issue back to the relationships between

the socialist state and its worker base, it must be remembered that those

relationships during the Cultural Revolution endured a political cataclysm.

In Shanghais January Storm o 1967, the clash between millions o red

workers and millions o scarlet workers led to a subjective breakdown

within the very category o working class and thereore within the entire

conceptual chain worker-actory-class-party-state that constituted the ide-

ological and organizational pillar o the socialist state. The rst result was

in act the collapse o the entire institutional machine o Shanghais party-

state. It is impossible here to investigate more precisely this crucial point, but

it should at least be recalled that in the Chinese state asset o the 1950s and

1960s, and in its original Soviet model, the relationship o worker-actory

was at the junction o a deadly ambiguity. The promise, essential to the

existence o the socialist state, o a ull political recognition o workers was

reduced to orms o productive and social control, disguised with loyalty toa historical-political ideal.

This ambiguity underwent the subjective scrutiny o the January Storm,

and, signicantly, Shanghai was then the city least involved in the actional

ghting and the most open to political and institutional innovation. Thanks

to a newly enlightened leading group that was able to turn the consequences

o that cataclysm into a stimulus or political experimentation, in Shanghai

until the mid-1970s there were important attempts at thinking political con-tent in the worker-actory relationship.

Mao tried to rely on those possibilities, although gropingly, when he

appealed to the mobilization o workers or solving the ghting at Qinghua.

Just a week beore the meeting with the Red Guards, Mao had published

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a text accompanying a report rom a Shanghai machinery actory, which

announced the opening o a worker university. Maos remark, emphasizedby the national press, enthusiastically supported the initiative, praising it as

the path to ollow in the transormation o the technical-scientic univer-

sities. Those strange worker universitieswhich in the ollowing years

were one o the strongest issues o the Maoist groupaudaciously linked

the universitys destiny to the experimentation o new political possibilities

in the worker-actory relationship.45 The issue deserves specic research to

clariy both the political content o some important experiments o the ol-lowing years up to the Chinese Thermidor o 1976 and their relationship

with the core sequence o the Cultural Revolution, whose end was declared

by the meeting with the ve leaders o the Beijing students.

The three main initiatives taken by the Maoist group at the end o July

1968the publication o Maos remark on the worker university o

Shanghai, the sending o the workers to Qinghua, and the meeting analyzed

aboveormed a coherent, although precarious and risky, set o political

decisions. The large distribution o the record o the meeting, both in the

orm o a synthetic summary and in its ull text, played a crucial role in the

attempts to nd a political way out o the impasse created by the actional

exhaustion, in act by the depoliticization, o the Red Guard organizations.

P.S. One Step, an Encounter

One could ask why such an exceptional document, published in the well-known 1969 edition o the collectionMao Zedong sixiang wansui (Long Live

Mao Zedong Thought, in the mid-1970s a must or contemporary China

scholarship) and supposedly amiliar to many specialists, has been rarely

quoted and never directly analyzed. The omission might have been acci-

dental, but more likely it is symptomatic o scholarships attitude toward the

Cultural Revolution and o the decline, both political and epistemic, o a

research eld nowadays almost lieless.As or the scholarly predicament o historiography and sociology in ac-

ing the Chinese events o the mid-sixties to mid-seventies, I have argued

elsewhere that the major theoretical diculty is that the Cultural Revolu-

tion undid the previously established conceptual bridges between history

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and politicsbridges that were crucial in the network o modern politi-

cal episteme and that all the social sciences had crossed when investigatingpolitical events.46 I am at present more inclined to stress the role o political

bewilderment, in act, a vast reactionary drit that has dominated the eld

since the 1980s, as the main cause o its desertication.47 I do not intend to

urther discuss the question here and limit mysel to summarizing some

circumstances o my work on this text and the arguments or considering it

as an important step into the analysis o the events.

For quite some time, I had looked at the record o this meeting as akey document, but only a ew years ago did I start to study it in detail. At

one level, or me its importance is that it marks a crucial caesura: in the

early hours o July 28, 1968, the core sequence o the Cultural Revolution

denitely resolves. That sequence had been determined by the existence o

independent political organizations, or the Red Guards, that through this

meeting were put under tutelage and shortly ater dissolved. This docu-

ment was thereore one o the main vouchers or the chronology o events

that I have proposed in a previous article, where I have also sketched some

preliminary arguments or reorganizing a perspective or research and a

possible way out o the deplorable scholarly impasse in the study o the Cul-

tural Revolution.48

Ater some hesitations and alse starts, I nally realized that starting

rom an examination o this ormidable transcript was the right step or

going beyond the preliminaries. As I had always been struck by the poten-

tial theatrical value o the text, I translated it entirely into Italian, both toscrutinize its details and with the intention, or better with the vague hope,

o submitting the script to a proessional artist rom whom I hoped to

receive a well-grounded answer to the question: could a brave director give

this text a theatrical enactment?

I met with particularly lucky circumstances. Shortly ater completing

the translation and writing a commentary that constitutes the basis o the

present article, I was visited by the artistic supervisor o Bolognas Teatro deiDispersi, Gianranco Rimondi, an extremely talented director and drama-

turge. Rimondi asked or some advice in the staging oBus Stop by Gao

Xingjian, whose Italian version I had helped edit some years earlier. As

the consulting involved sideline activities that the director had conceived as

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introductory to the Chinese social and political context, how could I have

hesitated to show him the script that I had just translated? Ater a ewdays, an enthusiastic response came: the company was strongly interested in

staging the conclusive scene.

An exciting experience then started: ater having slightly reduced the text

together with the director, deleting only some details, the rehearsals were a

unique occasion o a specialist seminar held literally on the stage. The ques-

tions posed by the director and the actors were precise, and the subsequent

discussions pertinent indeed: how to render the right intonation o one or

another o the participants o the meeting? Was the Chairmans attitude

more severe or rather indulgent in that remark? How relevant was a certain

literary or historical citation? Was not Lin Biao somewhat ironic in that

passage? How to realistically perorm Jiang Qings afiction, or Xie Fuzhis

sarcasm, or the little generals mix o real bewilderment and unshakable

attachment to their imaginary role?

Most remarkable was that the questions concerned primarily the subjec-

tive nature o the situation, or what was happening just on the stage, and

were largely indierent to the backstagenot only in the sense o the

vulgar version o the Cultural Revolution as an eect o plots and intrigues

but also in the perspective o the more classical historical-social scholarly

wisdom engaged in interpreting subjective attitudes as intrinsically linked

to objective conditions and in the last analysis grounded on them. One could

say that the actors and the director were doing their own jobs, and as they

were neither historians nor sociologists they could rerain rom those sorts oquestions. However, it was exactly their lack o attention to the relationships

between subjective and objective that allowed them to look at the text

as merely subjective, that is, as intrinsically political. To perorm the text

with the realism indispensable on the stage, the actors ocused on the decla-

rations in subjectivity, and in doing so they spontaneously adopted the only

perspective through which political situations can be thought.

The perormance was very successul.49 The actors in black scenic suits,standing in ront o music rests in a choruslike order, oered a masterly

reading o the document. The political and even the emotional relation-

ships among the characters were ully rendered in a thoughtul atmos-

phere, broken by a single coup de thtre: the rushing into the scene o the

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sobbing Kuai Dau coming out rom the parquet circle. The music o Bla

Bartks Miraculous Mandarin, well chosen or opening the perormanceand marking the pauses, enriched the horizon.

Marc Bloch once described the historian as rewinding the tape in a lm

viewer.50 To be sure, the idea that history is a movie that can be investi-

gated through a Movieola was just a metaphor or expressing the question

o temporality. However, ater that theatrical experience, I would argue, and

not only metaphorically, that at least in the case o politics, the stage rather

than the lm viewer is a much more suitable analytic support, because the

theater, more than cinematography, can claim a peculiar homogeneity with

political situations. Since ancient times, the mise-en-scne o political dilem-

mas has been a crucial element o the theater, because the declaration, or

the subjective precision o the statement, is as essential on the stage as it is in

politics meant as a subjective activity. Something similar can be told about

love, whose subjective choices are equally essential or the theater. Is there

not a declaratory essence o politics (and o love as well) that the theater can

grasp and illuminate more than any other artistic mode? That perorm-

ance, ar rom being a dramatization, showed the intimate proximity o

a document that records an unrepeatable moment o political subjectivity,

with the singularity o theater that exposes itsel, each night unrepeatable,

to its visitors in subjectivity.51

Notes

1 A preliminary project to examine this document was developed as a part o the 1999 gradu-

ate interdisciplinary seminar Cultural Revolution vs. Revolutionary Culture, held at the

University o Washington, Seattle, in the Program in Critical Asian Studies, under the

kind invitation o Tani Barlow. Suggestions and encouragement came rom Alain Badiou,

Edoarda Masi, and Claudia Pozzana, who read an earlier drat o this article. Thanks to

Giacomo Ferrarello, Robert Fulton, and Alex Passi or editorial assistance and linguistic

advice.

2 According to William Hinton, author o a book o inquiry written a ew years ater the

events, thirty thousand workers took part in the demonstration in an organized way, and

at least as many joined spontaneously. See Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at

Tsinghua University (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972).

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3 The transcript was published with the titleZhaojian shoudu hong dai hui fuzeren de tanhua

(Talk with the Responsible Persons of the Conference of the Red Guards of the Capital), hereater

cited as Tanhua, inMao Zedong sixiang wansui (Long Live the Thought of Mao Zedong) (n.p.,

1969), 687716, a nonocial publication attributed to an unidentied organization o Red

Guards, which contains most o Maos texts rom the years o the Cultural Revolution. The

volume has been well known to scholars since the 1970s thanks to reprints rom Taiwan

and Japan. A partial translation o the volume, though not always accurate enough, may

be ound in Miscellany of Mao Tse-tung Thought (19491968), Joint Publication Research

Service, 61269, pts. 1 and 2 (or the record o this meeting see pages 46997).

4 It is almost superfuous to recall that the relationships between Mao and the Red Guards are

unanimously considered by historians to possess an exclusive imaginary nature: A curious

alliance between an old leader and anatic teenagers that adored him like a God (Marie-

Claire Bergre,La rpublique populaire de Chine de 1949 nos jours(The Peoples Republic ofChina from 1949 to the Present) [Paris: Colin, 1989]).

5 Tanhua, 687. In the present article, all the quotations are taken rom the above-quoted vol-

umeMao Zedong sixiang wansui; all translations in this article are mine. The text is repro-

duced, unortunately somewhat imprecisely, in the Chinese Cultural Revolution Database,

ed. Song Yongyi (Hong Kong: Chinese University Press, 2002), with the title, added by the

editor,Zhaojian hongdaihui wu da lingxiu shi de tanhua (Talk at the Meeting with the Five

Great Leaders of the Red Guard Congress).

6 The action o Nie Yuanzi majority at Beida (abbreviation orBeijing Daxue [University o

Beijing]), called New Beida (Commune), was aliated with the Sky action. Thereore, it

was in principle allied with Kuai Dau and Han Aijings group; whereas the Beidas action

opposed to Nie (stemming rom a division o the same New Beida action) called New

Beida (Jinggangshan), or only Jinggangshan, was aliated with the Earth action. How-

ever, Jinggangshan was also the name o the majority action at Qinghua led by Kuai Dau,

who was in principle an ally o Nie and thereore an enemy o the Jinggangshan action

o Beida. In act, Nie pretended to be in a superior position (an Old Buddha) in regard

to the network o alliances. Moreover, the action opposed to Kuai at Qinghua was called

Jinggangshan (April 14th), or simply April 14th; it resulted rom the 1967 split o the

original Jinggangshan o Kuai Dau, now called Jinggangshan (Headquarters). There

were obviously various contradictions within each o the two main actions as well. With

the name Jinggangshan (the mountains o the rst red bases created by Mao in 1929)

caught in a tug-o-war between Sky and Earth, one o the great revolutionary modern

Chinese names became politically exhausted.

7 Hinton, La Guerra dei cento giorni: Rivoluzione culturale e studenti in Cina, trans. Silvia

Calamandrei (Turin: Einaudi, 1974), 182.

8 Tanhua, 69798.

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9 He also said: You must put politics in command, go among the masses and together with

them carry on the Cultural Revolution in a better way. See Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong

wengao (Mao Zedongs Manuscripts after Liberation), vol. 12 (Beijing: Zhongyang Wenxian

Chubanshe, 1998), 158. The demonstrations o 1966 deserve to be investigated beyond the

charismatic image that they obviously bear.

10 As told above (see note 6), both the Beida actions had the same name, New Beida, but

were distinguished by the label in parentheses: New Beida (Commune) and New Beida

(Jinggangshan). Mao remarked sarcastically that, merely at the level o the signier, they

were imitating the specication Bolshevik in parentheses in the title o the Russian Com-

munist Party, to distinguish it rom the Menshevik Communist Party.

11 Tanhua, 688.

12 Ibid., 68889.

13 SeeMao Zedong sixiang wansui, 648.

14 The quoted volume o Marie-Claire Bergre summarizes the current opinion in the spe-

cialized historiography. This is also a recurrent judgment in memoirs o the Red Guards,

especially among the most radical ones. See, or instance, Hua Linshan, Les annes rouges

(Paris: Seuil, 1987).

15 Tanhua, 689.

16 Ibid., 7079.

17 Ibid., 689.

18 A reconstruction o the actional contradictions at Qinghua, based on interviews with the

participants, may be ound in Joel Andreas, Political and Cultural Capital as Axes o Con-

tention in Student Factional Confict during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Theory and

Society 31 (2002): 463519.

19 Tanhua, 690.

20 Ibid.

21 This is another historical reerence, which here seems to have only a proverbial meaning, to

the military revolts that marked the all o the Han dynasty between the 2nd and the 3rd

centuries BC.

22 Tanhua, 700702.

23 Tan Houlan seemed not to have any special reason to oppose Jiang Qing, who during the

meeting recalls an episode in which she had helped her. However, because o Tans associa-

tion with the Earth action, she was allied with the Beida Jinggangshan (those who wanted

to ry Jiang Qing) that was hostile to the Central Group (as was also the case o Qinghua

April 14th). According to Jiang Qings words, the opponents to Tan at the Normal Univer-sity (those whom Tan had imprisoned in the dark without ood and drink) seem to have

also been hostile to the Central Group. The conused tangle o unprincipled alliances and

enmities among actions was proportional to their political exhaustion.

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24 The insistence with which the Central Group kept a distance rom involvement in ghts

between Red Guard organizations can be explained as a reaction to tendencies maniested

in the previous months inside the same organization. In September 1967, three o its mem-

bers, Qi Benyu, Guang Feng, and Wang Li, had been removed, accused o stirring up the

hostilities between the actions to strengthen their own position inside the Central Group.

The episode marked a critical passage, but during this meeting, it was only marginally

recalled.

25 As is well known, during the summer o 1967, the Wuhan incident showed the possibility

o serious clashes between local military commands and the central military machine.

26 Tanhua, 699700.

27 In act, Guanxis actional armed struggleone o the most sel-destructive episodes o

the Cultural Revolutionwas dealt with in a very dierent way than that on Beijings

campuses. The clashes were closed o not by disarmed workers, like those who entered in

Qinghua, but by the Peoples Liberation Army and the armed militia, which treated stu-

dents much more brutally. In the above-quoted memoir, Les annes rouges, Hua Linshan,

who was a member o a Red Guard organization in Guangxi, gives a dierent version than

that oered here by Mao and Lin Biao, and insists on the purely military orm o suppres-

sion. He conrms, however, and not without nostalgia, the heroic-militaristic imaginary

vision o politics that dominated among the Guangxi student actions in 1968.

28 Tanhua, 699.

29 Ibid., 704.

30 Hinton,La Guerra dei cento giorni.

31 Tanhua, 711. According to Hinton, the attitude o April 14th was due to serious military

diculties in that moment and to the act that they were on the point o being overwhelmed

by the Jinggangshan. In a sense, they welcomed the workers as their rescuers. Those o the

Jinggangshan who believed themselves to have almost reached a complete control o the

situation were particularly erce against the workers, whom they saw as stealing away their

victory. This detail urther conrms the total political groundlessness o the armed clashes

at Qinghua.

32 Tanhua, 700701.

33 The criticism o the theory o a docile tool was in those months one o the main polemi-

cal arguments against Liu Shaoqis most amous work, Lun gonchandagyuan xiuyang (On

the Cultivation of a Member of the Communist Party), translated into English with the title

How to Be a Good Communist, which in the past decades, and especially in the early 1960s,

had constituted a undamental ideological-moral breviary in the political pedagogy o theCCP.

34 A vivid narration o the disciplinary atmosphere in the Chinese schools in the early 1960s,

especially the most prestigious ones, may be ound in Rae Yangs memoir Spider Eaters

(Berkeley: University o Caliornia Press, 1997).

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35 Tanhua, 693.

36 Gao Yubao has been the author o a book o memories translated into several languages by

the Foreign Languages Press.

37 Tanhua, 693.

38 Together with Claudia Pozzana, I have translated into Italian and commented on the works

o these authors in two anthologies:Nuovi poeti cinesi (Torino: Einaudi, 1995) and Unaltra

Cina: Poeti e narratori degli anni Novanta,

Documents

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